Farmers urged to spend money to ‘save our soils’

ANDREW ARBUCKLE

Farmers were yesterday urged to spend more time and money looking at their soils which have suffered from the heavy rainfall of the past two years.

Speaking at Oatridge campus, which is now part of the combined SRUC, drainage expert and senior agricultural consultant Seamus Donnelly said a great deal of productive capacity has been lost from the land.

“Save our soils” and “Scotland’s wealth is not oil, it is soil” were the catchphrases he used to concentrate the minds of the 300-plus farmers looking at how they could put life back into their land. He estimated that up to 3 per cent of the productive capacity of grassland could be currently lost through a loss of basic fertility.

One of the basic building blocks of production is land, with just the right balance between alkalinity and acidity, and this has traditionally been achieved through the application of lime.

Donnelly said that more than half of the 1,000 samples he had taken recently had been below the optimum productive level, indicating that farmers had fallen behind with this aspect of husbandry.

If their grass fields were looking pale, he said the decision taken by the farmer was often to put on additional nitrogen, but liming or use of a mechanical aerator could be more beneficial.

For some areas of land, there might be the need to carry out drainage work, and full schemes can cost around £2,500 per acre. Few farmers could justify that level of expenditure, but he said he was hopeful changes to the Scottish Rural Development Programme might see such projects being accepted.

He believed there was clear justification for public expenditure on such schemes, listing reducing the carbon footprint, prevention of flooding of local villages and the production of more food.

If there was a move to carry out more drainage, he said one difficulty might be the lack of experienced drainers. The machinery might be there but the knowledge might not.

This website and its associated newspaper adheres to the Independent Press Standards Organisation's Editors' Code of Practice.
If you have a complaint about editorial content which relates to inaccuracy or intrusion, then contact the
Editor by clicking here.

If you remain dissatisfied with the response provided then you can contact the IPSO by
clicking here.

The Scotsman provides news, events and sport features from the Edinburgh area. For the best up to date information relating to Edinburgh and the surrounding areas visit us at The Scotsman regularly or bookmark this page.

For you to enjoy all the features of this website The Scotsman requires permission to use cookies.

Find Out More ▼

What is a Cookie?

What is a Flash Cookie?

Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?

About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.

This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.

Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.

The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:

Revenue Science ►

A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.

Google Ads ►

Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.

Digital Analytics ►

This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.

Dart for Publishers ►

This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.

ComScore ►

ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.

Local Targeting ►

Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.

Grapeshot ►

We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.

Subscriptions Online ►

Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.

Add This ►

Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.